Sunday, September 20, 2009

America's Next Great Supercar

The Devon GTX was officially unveiled at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance on August 15.
On July 23, the GTX set a Laguna Seca one-lap production car record of 1:35.075. This compares to "rough" estimates that put the Nissan GT-R's lap time at 1:39.62, and the Porsche 911 Turbo's lap time at 1:39.89.

The stunning event caused company founder, Scott Devon, to say "The Laguna Seca test session showed us just a glimpse of what the Devon GTX is capable of from a performance perspective. Through further validation and testing, we know this car is capable of even greater lap times and making an even stronger statement about the future of the American supercar."

The design is sensational, but are plans to build and market the Devon GTX at $500,000 a copy, beginning in early 2010, overly ambitious?
Scott Devon, CEO of Los Angeles-based Devon Motorworks and owner of Michigan-based Cole's Frozen Foods (which bills itself as "Home of the Original Frozen Garlic Bread"), doesn't think so. Devon is already touting the GTX as the "next great American supercar," and says he expects to build and sell 36 cars a year from his Southern California headquarters.
The GTX actually started life several years ago as the VR Concept, from the pen (and computer) of Swedish designer Daniel Paulin, the former Ford designer who created the Focus C-Max and founded Paulin Motor Company in Gothenburg in 2005. Images of the VR Concept, with its unusual articulating doors, can be seen on Paulin's Web site.
Earlier this year, Devon made an unsuccessful bid to acquire the tooling and rights to the Dodge Viper, which Chrysler at the last minute yanked from the scrap heap and transferred to new owner Fiat.
Not surprisingly, the specs for the Devon GTX sound suspiciously Viperesque: a wheelbase of 98.8 inches, coil springs and gas-pressurized shocks at all four corners and an 8.4-liter V10 engine under the hood, driving the rear wheels through a six-speed manual gearbox and a limited-slip differential.
In the Devon GTX, the engine has been tweaked, with output nudged to 650 horsepower.

Devon Motorworks has released a new promotional video of their GTX supercar at Laguna Seca.